The unit is powered by a 1.4GHz dual core processor, patent-pending Active Antennas to boost range, and three Wi-Fi bands with quad-streams. It also uses 1024 QAM modulation and and MU-MIMO technology. It boasts a total of eight antennas, four internal and four patent-pending external Active Antennas. Unlike typical antennas that simply relay the Wi-Fi signal received from your devices to the router, Active Antennas amplify the Wi-Fi signal within the external antenna itself. This compensates for the low power of Wi-Fi devices to provide a more symmetrical connection for both receiving and sending wireless signals, which contributes to improving overall range and speed at long range.

In addition, the Nighthawk X8 offers a unique Dynamic QoS prioritization capability that recognizes each individual application and the device it is running on, and prioritizes their network traffic accordingly. The unit also provides a port aggregation capability (also known as “port trunking”). The router has six Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, the largest number available on a mainstream home router. Two of these ports can be aggregated to double the gigabit connection to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device — such as all current NETGEAR ReadyNAS models with two Ethernet ports — to support 4K HD streaming, faster backups, and faster file transfers.